This application relates to a utility knife for cleaning a conductor and, more particularly, to a utility knife having an integrated wire brush to allow a lineman to clean a conductor before making a connection.
When repairing utility lines, linemen often times have to use connectors to splice and join two sections of a conductor together—connection point. If the conductor is dirty, then the conductor needs to be cleaned prior to using the connector to join the two section of the conductor. If not cleaned, a dirty conductor can cause several problems such as outages, excessive heat at the connection point, and open neutrals which may cause appliances in homes to burn up.
Often times when linemen are working on utility lines, they do not have the proper tool to clean the conductor so they use the back of their utility knife to scrape the conductor. Unfortunately, not only does the scraping not get the conductor properly cleaned, but the scraping can cause damage to the aluminum conductor.